First Person: Mid-Hudson workers are base for many IBM breakthroughs

Aug. 16, 2011

Rod Adkins

Written by

Rod Adkins

For the Poughkeepsie Journal

IBM's centennial celebrates how far we've come in the last 100 years as well as the possibilities of where we can go.

For more than 70 years, IBMers in the mid-Hudson Valley have made significant contributions to the evolution of technology, and can look forward to leading the way as we enter into a new era of computing.

In 1941, when we were still in the tabulating era, IBM came to the valley when founder Thomas J. Watson Sr. opened a hardware manufacturing plant in Poughkeepsie. In 1963, IBM began semiconductor manufacturing operations in East Fishkill.

Since then, IBM employees in the valley have made countless contributions to the growth of the technology industry. Most notably, IBM ushered in the computing era in 1964 by launching the System/360, a product that was a turning point in computing and business operations. Much of the research and development for that system was done here in the valley, a tradition that continues today with even more advanced systems.

Looking to the future, we are entering the era of learning systems. What do I mean by that? Think about IBM's Watson, which outsmarted top "Jeopardy!" champions earlier this year in an exhibition. Watson's ability to sift through vast amounts of unstructured data to rapidly produce the question to a range of answers in casual English language — even with nuances such as irony and riddles — shows how smarter computing can change the world.

The engine driving Watson is IBM's latest Power7 processor, which is built right here at our East Fishkill plant.

Worldwide impact

Imagine a Watson-like computing system that's loaded with countless numbers of medical papers and can help doctors answer diagnosis questions during an emergency room crisis. Or a system that can quickly sift through case law to help lawyers find a useful precedent or citation. These types of systems would allow businesses and governments to respond intelligently to our needs and more efficiently deliver vital services such as transportation, health care, education and public safety. The possibilities are endless.

As the world continues to become smarter with a trillion connected things — cellphones, tablets, GPS, cash registers, postal packages, televisions, among many others — all these interconnected things will produce seven zettabytes of data around the world by 2015. For those counting, a zettabyte is a 1 followed by 21 zeroes.

Faced with a tidal wave of data, businesses and governments need smarter computing systems that are designed to handle dramatic increases in data volumes, tuned for specific tasks and greatly simplify information technology management through cloud computing. Smarter computing will help enable new business models and improved economic value in the coming years. But these innovations can't happen without the foundational work of local IBMers who build the specialized hardware technologies of these smarter systems.

It is clear that the tremendous amount of data around us can help improve the world. We just need to work together across industries to invent ways to do it. The path to this kind of useful, smarter computing runs directly through the mid-Hudson Valley, where IBMers are helping to build a smarter planet.